Weekend reads: Elsevier mutiny; babies as co-authors; what to do after rejection

This week’s Weekend Reads, which appears below, was preempted yesterday by the news that the Office of Research Integrity had issued a finding of misconduct in the long-running case of Anil Potti. The week also featured news about a child psychiatry trial halted for unexplained reasons, and saw the launch of our new weekly column at STAT, a new life sciences site from Boston Globe Media. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online,” Scott Jaschik reports at Inside Higher Education. More from Mathew Ingram at Fortune, and Ellen Wexler at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• “Can I add a baby as a co-author of a scientific paper?” Find out how people responded to this Academia Stack Exchange question.
• Scientific journals by kids! Brought to you by Grant Jacobs.
• “If [impact factor] mania is indeed a medical condition, the most appropriate course of action may be disimpaction,” write Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang in mBio. (Fang is a member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit organization.)
• So, your paper has been rejected. Chloe Tuck, of Technical Editorial Services, explains your options for an appeal.
• “Dishonesty in scientific research:” Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely weigh in. (Journal of Clinical Investigation)
• More than 180 scientists have signed a petition asking the BMJ to retract an investigation – which has been corrected — into U.S. dietary guidelines, Arielle Duhaime-Ross reports at The Verge.
• Meanwhile, the BMJ is also being criticized for an infographic it published about e-cigarettes, notes Clive Bates.
• Yale nutrition researcher David Katz is facing scrutiny for having used a sock puppet to review his own book on Amazon, David Yaffe-Bellany of the Yale Daily News reports.
• “Are Reviewers’ Scores Influenced by Citations to Their Own Work?” A study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine takes a look. (sub req’d)
• A neuroscientist accused of breaking a publishing agreement has been fired by a leading Chinese university, David Cyranoski reports at Nature.
• Scientists need to fail better, says Stuart Firestein in Nautilus.
• That “bacon causes cancer” report from the WHO? It’s been retracted because it turns out to have been written by pigs, says the satirical site the (Un)Australian.
• The RIKEN Institute spent about 92 million yen (about $750,000 USD) on its investigation into misconduct surrounding STAP stem cells, Japan Times reports.
• “The Critical Finance Review is planning to publish issues dedicated to replicating the most influential empirical papers in financial economics.” Here’s their request for papers.
• Mark your calendars: The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences will be holding a replication and transparency workshop on January 6 and 7.
• Academic journals still matter, says George Campbell Gosling. Here’s why.
• What do researchers expect from peer review? At the Scholarly Kitchen, Phil Davis takes a look at a new study by Taylor & Francis.
• Want to collaborate? Jenny Delassale describes how Piirus, a non-profit whose blog she edits, can help.
• “When Debunking Scientific Myths Fails (and When It Does Not),” a new paper from Christina Peter and Thomas Koch in Science Communication. (sub req’d Following this post, SAGE has made this freely available through 2015)
• “How does peer review shape science?” A new paper from Justin Esarey.
• Is more exposure of your research always a good thing? asks Karin Wulf at the Scholarly Kitchen.
• A strange website is claiming to be a respected citation index, reports Jeffrey Beall.
• “An ambitious study that planned to collect information on 80,000 British babies throughout their lives has ended just 8 months after its official launch because not enough prospective parents signed up,” Helen Pearson reports in Nature.
• The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won’t release climate records to the House of Representatives science committee, Jeff Tollefson reports. More from David Roberts.
• Open access is at a crossroads, says David Crotty at the Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Let us briefly consider what kind of academic Academia.edu and ResearchGate encourages and teaches us to become,” writes Alex Rushforth.
• “Multiple Authorship in Scientific Manuscripts:” Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva and Judit Dobránszki take a look at “Ethical Challenges, Ghost and Guest/Gift Authorship, and the Cultural/Disciplinary Perspective” in Science and Engineering Ethics (sub req’d)
• Professors in Poverty: A new documentary on adjunct faculty.
• “Is industry funding undermining trust in science?” asks David Matthews in Times Higher Education.
• The authors of a “stunning study on deaths among middle-aged whites” in the U.S. reveal that it was rejected by JAMA and NEJM before being published in PNAS. (Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post)
• John Ioannidis, of “most published research findings are false” fame, and Robert Kaplan did a Reddit Ask Me Anything this week. Here’s a transcript from Akshat Rathi at Quartz.
• What’s the best way to network at a conference? Emily Sohn offers tips in Nature.
• Why won’t bad scientific ideas go away? The Journal of Cell Science’s Mole has some ideas. And David Castelvecchi has six “zombie” physics ideas that won’t die (Nature).
• Did the White House pressure agencies to highlight “tenuous” obesity research? Chuck Ross reports at the Daily Caller.
• It appears that an “otherwise reasoned statement” was otherwise incorrect, leading to this erratum from a Duke journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. 
• Jeffrey Beall wants ORCID to do something about the predatory publishers who are using the service.
• A paper in Current Biology on chimpanzees is questioning an earlier paper in the same journal. (New York University press release)

Retractions outside of science

• “The retraction of an article calling for the impeachment of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on an independent online platform has caused other columnists to withdraw their articles in protest and stirred up debate over media censorship.” (Alison Hsiao, Taipei Times)
• “We now accept that the shirt was not stolen or taken, but was rather thrown by Smith into the stands.” HITC retracts a story about an alleged football match incident.

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